Today started with rain

Then about 1 o'clock the sun came out and so did the wild life

You can tell by the water the wind is strong, and it has changed directions which means we now have to more if we want any rest tonight.

This is the view from our window of our new parking spot.

Tonight's stop, it's one of the free spots all over Friesland, we can stay 3 days if we choose.  

Sorry for the delay in posts

The locals

Sorry for the delay in posts, we will try to catch up soon.

Tonight we are staying at a Marina, we meet another Australian couple from Melbourne who have been doing what we are, they started their adventure 8 years ago, we had them around for drinks to get some hints and advise.

Nieuweschoot

On the road again....someone has to do it.....and I pick us 🙂

You can just make out on the left of the photo a turnoff, sorry it's not the best view I was concentrating on the sign on the right. 



Our turn off: Heerenveen, you can see the sign on the right of the photo, the sign in the middle of the photo is a for sale sign for the farm, if you are interest in buying a farm in Holland.

 

Our stop for the night. If you are interested you can zoom out on the map and see the lake Martin and I walked too after dinner. This was also the place Martin fixed the fan in the fridge, such a clever boy.

Meppel - We stayed here until 6th July

We see a lot of fisherman fishing on the banks of the canal but never anyone catching one, well we have now.

The lady in the photo is from Canberra, her and her husband brought their boat this year.

You can is Ardella on the right side of the photo.

Waiting for the tide

So on the Monday morning when the lock opened at 0800 we had to wait until almost 0830 as another ship was coming through.  This lock was 165m long and probably at least 10m wide.  No point in flushing all that water just for us.
Anyway, the ship was Stiro which is a scrap metal barge from Holland.  We followed her in and then kept up with them for the next two locks.
As we came up to the second lock at Herbrum there was a line up of ships waiting to go through so we asked if we could tie up to Stiro and then had a chat with Natalie who is the skipper.
She told us that there wasn't enough water on the other side and they were waiting for high tide. So there we sat for an hour and a half, had a chat, had some lunch and then when the bridge opened we snuck in behind the first boat in the queue.
From here on the Ems river is tidal so we had the current slightly against us for the first half hour and then it was working with us for the reminder of our trip in to Papenburg.

This is us leaving Stiro (boat 3 in the queue) and sneeking past boat 2 to go into the lock with boat 1 in the queue.

Lock times in germany

So we had a bit of a late start and by the time we had tossed the coin, decided we were going to stay in Germany and head downstream in the Ems River (going north) and topped up with water, we didn't leave until about 1100.
First lock, no problems however we did ask what time are the locks open until.  On a Sunday, 2pm.

Anyway, cutting a long story short, we ended up staying at the side of the river because we got there right on 2pm.  Meant I had plenty of time to walk around in the afternoon and look at the other side of the lock which was undergoing maintenance.  No idea what maintenance they were doing.

(I've just noticed a problem with the dates in Google photos.  Because sometimes I've been a bit slack in keeping the blog up to date I rely on the date time stamp in the photo to manually set the date of the post.  Now I see that the date of the photo is not necessarily the time the photo was taken but really the time that the photo was synced back to google.  Normally the same but not in this case.)

This photo below that I edited is the most interesting.
From the top of the yellow it is roughly in thirds.  The top third is normally out of the water, the middle third is the water range and the bottom third is always under water.  When we come in we tie up at two of the circled points one with Belinda at the front and one with me at the rear.  As we move up or down we will probably also need to move the line.

Haren - Germany

Just a shot of the bridge coming in to Haren and I happened to have time to take it.

When we came over the border of course our phones could no longer pick up the Netherlands cell towers and they wanted to start roaming.  There in lies a new problem and I'm going to blame that for my tardiness with keeping this blog updated.

Here's the perfect storm:

1. Belindas phone is on a new plan (they had only came out with the plan a week before we got it)

2. My phone was on a plan that doesn't roam

3. The roaming with Belindas phone worked ok for voice calls but not data

4. I didn't realise this until just after 6pm on the Saturday and we wouldn't be able to call until Monday morning

5. The wifi in the marina was all but non existant

6. I needed the internet on mine or Belindas to look up settings on how to configure her phone to make the data work

7. We were both due to do work connecting back to Australia and so we kind of did 'need' the internet access.

Anyway, we only paid for the one night and on the Sunday morning before we left we tossed a coin, Heads, we'll just go back the way we came and get the internet stuff sorted and then do something from there, Tails, we'll push on regardless and hope for better wifi late on Sunday and then on Monday we'll get in contact with Belindas carrier and sort that out.  Tails it is.

Locks - the old way

I took these shots of our lock keeper opening the gates for us on our way in to Ter Apel to show how it used to be done.  Even when we where in France a couple of years ago and they had manual locks they didn't do it like this.  At least there they had a wheel on the side that moved the gears and that moved the gates.  At this lock, everything manual, lucky there's not too many of these.

Veen Park

 'Veen' is translated to peat and so Veen Park is a museum showing all about the peat 'harvesting' that they have done over the ages.  Quite interesting.
I took these shots so you can see what the close up of a thatched roof looks like.

 



Some of the tools used for cutting the Peat bricks on the cart you can see the wet Peat Bricks



He is holding dried Peat brick that is ready for burning.

 

The train that took use to the Peat site

 A cubby house


The front door is the right size for a child, an adult would need to duck.

 Inside the cubby

Bed

Kitchen

Living area